


As I Take You Home

by Evoket



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Creepy Hannibal Lecter, Eventual Smut, M/M, Possessive Hannibal Lecter, Protective Hannibal Lecter, will just wants to fish. he didnt ask for this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-04-19 00:38:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14225322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evoket/pseuds/Evoket
Summary: Hannibal decides that regardless of Will’s desires, he needs someone to protect him. For better or worse.Set after the events of 3x07, Digestivo. Instead of surrendering to the authorities, Hannibal disappears. Sort of.





	1. Chapter 1

It starts with a tooth that he finds on the edge of his property while idly searching for material for his lures. The dogs ignore the way he picks it up and goes still, too busy bounding with glee in the dew-dropped late summer evening.

Will doesn’t turn it in for forensics analysis. He leaves it on his fly table that evening, tries not to think about it. Thinks,  _ That tooth is definitely human. _ Thinks,  _ I shouldn’t go outside, maybe ever again _ .

But he has class to teach the next day, so he does. 

He’s tired, is the truth of it. He’s suffered more facial incisions due to his career choices than seems fair. He’s almost died too many times. Most nights, he sits on the porch with shitty, bitter coffee and his shotgun propped up on his thigh, watching the horizon.

He fantasizes that if he watches long enough, a small figure will appear at the treeline. It will slowly grow bigger and bigger, and eventually, he’ll see its face. Or its lack thereof.

But he doesn’t let the fantasy go farther than that. He never does.

Instead, some nights, he walks towards the treeline, barefoot, grass cold and pliant beneath his soles. He reaches dirt and forest, stands shivering and shrouded in pitch-black foliage. He forces himself to wait before he turns around. And when he does, his house is lit-up and warm, a beacon for him to come home too.

This is the closest feeling he’ll ever have to home.

He sleeps too much now, lets the dogs onto the bed with him. He dreams of teeth, acres of teeth, dreams he is walking on soft grass and when he looks down it is teeth, and his dream-self thinks,  _ How on earth did I grow this many _ ? When he wakes up, he is too tired to brush, but he pries open his lips in the mirror and counts to make sure they’re all there. 

He doesn’t sign up to teach next semester. He stops picking up his phone. One day he walks out to the river and drops his phone in the water and he thinks,  _ This is fine. This is fine. _ He never walks by the patch where he picked up the one tooth. It still rests on the fly table, but he hasn’t put it in any lures - sometimes, he just looks at it until his eyes blur. He manages his trips into town to buy groceries without a single word to anyone, without even a suggestion of eye contact, no matter how hard the checkout clerk tries.

He makes it a month before Jack drives out to his house and says, “Will.”

“Jack,” he says back from the porch. Winston obliviously wags his tail and pants open-mouthed, excited to have company. “The answer is no.”

“I haven’t even--” Jack cuts himself off, already frustrated. Will resolutely gazes at the driver’s side door Jack has left open, ignoring the urge to go back in and slam the door shut behind him. Jack would just come in anyway. It’s not like he has strong locks.

“Look,” he begins again, straining to sound patient. “I know you’ve shut off from this work. But this case is different.”

“They’re all  _ different _ ,” Will says. 

Jack’s gaze drops. “We think it’s him,” he says.

Will presses his lips together until they nearly go white. “Definitely no, then.”

“It’s -- it’s different, though. He didn't take any organs.”

Will knows what’s coming next.

“He took the teeth,” he says. 

“So you’ve seen the case already, then?” Jack says. There’s a hint of suspicion in his voice. A hint of fear. 

“No,” says Will, and he sighs and drags fingers through his hair, unruly and unreasonably long. He doesn’t know the last time he had it cut. “He left me one.”

Jack grimaces. “How long ago?”

“About a month.”

“And you didn’t think to call?”

“I dropped my phone in the river.” He meets Jack’s gaze. It’s a white lie. He did  _ eventually _ drop his phone in the river. Just a little bit after.

Jack sighs. “Well, go ahead and show me, then.”

Will already knows there’s no hope of finding fingerprints on it, so he carries it out in his bare hands. It’s dirty and small and Jack squints at it like it’ll have the killer’s coordinates neatly engraved with a laser. 

“I’ll have Zeller and Price take a look at it,” he says finally. “Have you found any more?”

“I haven’t been looking,” Will says. It’s honest. He’s been exclusively searching for lure materials elsewhere, giving the site a wide breadth as though it were a mouth poised, at any moment, to open up and swallow him whole. “There might be.”

“Show me,” says Jack. 

It truly is a sight, when they reach it: a neat circle of 31 more teeth in various states of decay from exposure and erosion. Will does a mental countdown. One a day. A full dental set, including wisdoms.

Jack grimly snaps on gloves and sets to gathering them all after photographing the arrangement. “The lab needs to look at these as soon as possible,” he says. “I’ll call you with the findings.”

“No phone,” Will reminds him. 

“Go buy a damn burner,” Jack says. “We’ll need you to come in tomorrow.” He starts to walk back towards where his car is parked, towards Will’s beacon of a home. 

“I’m not coming,” Will calls after him. Jack doesn’t bother to respond.

“I’m not,” Will mutters to himself. Not going to buy a phone, not going to drive to Quantico, not going to  _ think _ about the faerie circle offering lain orderly on the edge of his property. Just not. He’s going to fish tomorrow. When it gets cold enough in a couple of months, he’s going to ice fish. He’s not going to visualize amber lights anymore. He’s not.

But the good doctor’s face comes to him unbidden, smiling, terrifying. The good doctor’s voice whispers in his ear,  _ Come, dear Will. You know you’ve missed me. _

He shudders. He looks around. All he sees is Jack’s car peeling off the dirt road.

“I don’t,” he whispers. He does.


	2. Chapter 2

The techs can’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know. A tooth a day for the last month, more or less; no new ones this morning, and Jack has annoyingly sent agents to stake out his house. The wisdom teeth hadn’t breached the gums naturally -- the good doctor had dug them out. And then comes the case file.

Will hates that he takes it with shaking hands, hates the way that Price and Zeller scurry out like mice, hates the way Jack looks at him like he is leaving a scalpel with a child. Hates the manila folder. Hates that Beverly isn't there. 

One victim, the teeth in his backyard matching the dental records. Will knows, looking at the pictures, that it’s him. He breathes. He tries to breathe.

He closes his eyes. He lets the amber light swing.

_ I do this out of devotion. _

_ I follow him home, cautiously. I strangle him in his own living room. Controlled. Precise. I watch the struggle fade from his eyes. He doesn’t know me; he doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve this. _

_ I try to take no pleasure. I tilt his head back gently into my lap, use pliers to pry out his teeth. I leave them in a pile on the floor. I dig out the recalcitrant few. I do this out of devotion. _

_ I take care to clean the blood. Meticulously, I place each stem in each socket of his gums, trimming some down to the appropriate height. When I am done, he has teeth once more, pure white, soft as not to crush. I cradle his head when I carry him out onto the porch. I place him in his rocking chair, mouth open as though he were laughing. _

_ Devotion. _

_ This is my design.  _

“Will?” Jack says, carefully coming back into the room. Will lets his eyes come into focus once more, swallows down the breaking in his throat.

“Yes,” he says. “It’s him.”

Price and Zeller file in behind Jack, ready to reel off the facts. Will braces himself, though he knows what is coming.

“Victim was 32, male, went to juvie for petty theft when he was a kid but other than that, no criminal record,” Price says. “Overall, a pretty stand-up guy. He lived in the woods, but there were other houses fairly nearby. No one heard any disturbance, so Lecter probably snuck up on him. We wouldn’t think it was him on account of no organs, but, well, he’s on the lam, and his flowers are distinctive. Symbolic.”

“And the symbolism behind these?” Will asks. His mouth is dry.

“Lily-of-the-valley. Return of happiness,” Zeller says.

“He’s coming back,” Will says quietly.

“That’s what we want you to tell us,” Jack says. “Why no organs? Why  _ teeth _ , why in your backyard?”

“He’s changing his ways,” Will says.

“He still killed a guy,” Zeller says.

And Will says, “But not for meat.”

The room goes silent. 

“He -- he’s saying he’s reformed,” Will says, filling the room uncomfortably. “He’s giving me his teeth; he isn’t eating anymore. No organs -- no meat. He thinks he is this man, that what he did before was just minor rule-breaking but he can -- he can change. For me. He has changed. He wants me to trust him again.”

And though Jack doesn’t say it, Will hears it:  _ Do you?  _

What he eventually does say, in his gruff, displeased voice, is “I want another search team going through Will’s house. All of it. His yard, the woods. We will find something. He’s got to be close.”

And though Will doesn’t say it, everybody hears it:  _ When have you ever found anything before? _

“Can I still go home tonight?” he asks hoarsely, and then, as extra leverage, “I’ve got to take care of the dogs…”

“Fine,” Jack says.

So Will goes home.

After the agents have rifled through every centimeter of his property, Will is finally left on his bed, his bones inexplicably dense and exhausted, Winston licking his foot as the smaller dogs yip and try to jump their up through sheer willpower. He almost wants to be scared, wants to feel the way that a person would feel. But for all his talk of wanting to never even think of him again, he does. He wishes.

That night, he falls asleep fantasizing about a small figure stalking towards him from the treeline. He waits on his porch and isn’t afraid, even as the creature’s footsteps crunch over fields and fields of teeth. He feels like skin might feel towards a knife suspended a few centimeters above. Anxious, breathless. Something close, even, to longing.

He’s right about the agents: they find nothing, not even footprints, and Will thinks of the way the good doctor would creep softly on cat’s feet. Jack waits for the next victim. Will knows there won’t be one. _It was an apology_ , he thinks. _An offering_. But Jack insists the Ripper kills in sounders, and Will allows him the comfort of thinking there is still a pattern to what he does.

Months pass by, and Jack is still holding his breath. The knife lifts. The stream by Will’s house freezes, and he subsists on the fish he stored in the warmer seasons. He still sits out on his porch at night, but now in thick woolen socks. Nothing is where the faerie circle once lay save frost-covered grass that crunches under the dogs’ feet.

And Jack is still holding his breath.

Will feels the frustration in his voice each time he calls like gravel in the mouth. He wants answers, wants explanation, wants a location, wants anything to go off of. Eventually, all that turns up is that the Ripper once killed a man who frequented the same store the victim stole from all those years ago.

_ Petty theft _ , thinks Will.

In late January, after the days and weeks and months of nothing, they have a new killer to investigate. Jack’s anger at the Ripper subsides from a pulse to a dull throbbing with somewhere new to direct his energies. The guy kills five cops -- three retired, two current -- and two civilians, at first once every couple of weeks, but now getting faster, more frequent, more frenzied. He shoots them in the hearts while they sleep. The DNA at all the crime scenes matches itself, but nothing in the system.

The press is calling him the Sandman.

Will reluctantly stands in the corner of the lab while Price and Zeller bounce theories back and forth. He has a vendetta. A cop abused him once. He’s a cop himself. He’s dying, hence the increased speed. He’s scared of being caught for a crime he got away with once. He thinks himself an angel of justice. He wants reform. None of it’s right; Will knows none of it is right.

“Will,” Jack says softly. Will looks at his teeth rather than in his eyes. Jack wanted him at the crime scene, but he didn’t pick up his phone for four days. Jack eventually had had to drive out to Wolf Trap and practically drag him here bodily.

“I don’t know,” Will grits out. If it’s not his good doctor, he doesn’t care. He’s looked at the photos, he’s seen the files, and he doesn’t care. He wants to go home. He wants to sit on his porch and drink a finger or a fistful of whiskey and stare at the seam where forest meets field.

Zeller and Price exchange a look and quickly and quietly leave the room. It’s just him and Jack now, him and Jack and some bullets on a table surgically removed from still, lifeless hearts. Will feels his pulse, maybe Jack’s pulse, maybe something else altogether pounding on his temple from the inside. He wants to go home. 

_ The return of happiness _ , his mind says, and doesn’t want to think about why. Doesn’t want to know. “I can’t do anything for you, Jack,” and before anything can stop him, make him second-guess, make him feel guilty, the door is swinging shut behind him and he is leaving the building.

He buys dog food on his way home, and he doesn’t buy it at his usual place in Wolf Trap because the clerk keeps looking at him, keeps smiling shyly, and Will can’t even think of anyone as beautiful anymore, can’t look higher than the line of their jaw or the length of their hair. And he hates being an asshole to someone who just wants to maybe talk to him, maybe kiss him, maybe do more in an ideal world, but clearly this is not an ideal world. 

It’s a grocery store in Baltimore. The lighting is fluorescent and he hates it because it’s not the fluorescent he knows. The aisles aren’t in the places he wants them to be. He can’t keep his head down and shuffle to the pet food like he always does; he has to browse and he has to feel people noticing him, but he keeps his head down anyway, and maybe this is why he bumps into the man.

The man is disheveled and scruffy, frizzy brown hair and beard matted to the sides of his face, his coat green and baggy and dirty, and he seems to be perpetually on the edge of panic. Will would stay looking over the man’s shoulder, but when he doesn’t move to get out of the way, Will is forced to look him in the eyes.

Bloodshot, afraid. The second Will makes contact the man darts for the door out of the store, and Will thinks,  _ Well, that’s the city _ . He lived in New Orleans. He knows what cities are like. Too many people left out on the streets, too many people scared and hungry and nervous almost always, too many people with nowhere to sleep so they never sleep. They duck into stores hoping for something they can grab and the skittish ones learn to bolt before anyone even asks. He doesn’t even turn to look at the man as he leaves.

So he doesn’t see him get in the mud-crusted white truck. 

And when Will drives home, 20 pounds of dog food sagging in his backseat, he doesn’t notice the mud-crusted white truck follow him all the way to the exit for Wolf Trap.

When Will sleeps that night, visions of the good doctor worm their way into his brain, and he hears him whisper something in a language he doesn’t speak, and velvety antlers begin to pry open his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that anxiety disorder feel when you have to enter a new grocery store (the worst feel)
> 
> i've never had a beta reader before on account of never having written fanfiction before but uhh.... hit me up if you wanna do that? i don't even know how it would work, but i am Open to New Experiences!
> 
> stay tuned for definitely more murder, probably more imagery involving teeth, and maybe someone actually saying the good doctor's name


	3. Chapter 3

Four days later, Will wakes in a sweat, and he needs  _ out _ , out of his house, out of his goddamn mind, and he opens the door, and there’s a corpse on his porch.

He rolls his head back, drags his hands down his face, pulls the skin and exposes the reds of his eyes to the moon. This is a dream, or a hallucination, and he’s had those before; he knows their type. He hasn’t had any in a while, but -- he remembers. He knows he can get out of this.

Except he can smell it, and he’s never dreamt the smell of death before.

He looks down as though the body will have disappeared, but it hasn’t. 

Then he calls Jack.

His house has turned into a crime scene, and he just wants to be alone. It’s nearing dawn and agents are still taking notes on their little notepads, the body and its bouquet still splayed across his porch, and he can’t leave because everyone has questions, questions, questions. Does he know this man? Has he ever seen this man? Running like an undercurrent through their words,  _ Did you kill this man? _

They find the man’s eyes on Will’s fly table, and Will shivers because the doctor’s been  _ in his house _ while he was asleep, and everyone else shivers because they think Will’s finally snapped -- has maybe been snapped for a long while.

This is the tamest Will has ever seen the good doctor’s work. Aside from the eyes, there’s no mutilation; he slit his throat simply, left his body on the porch while the blood was still pulsing out. He took no organs, kept no trophies. A reformed man, Will thinks.

He might not think it were him at all were it not for the flowers sprouting from the body’s eye sockets, stems red like veins.

It’s nearly nine in the morning by the time they’re packing the body up. Will watches blearily from his kitchen table, and Jack is gruff and perfunctory in his apology. He offers Will a ride to the lab. Will either says yes or he says nothing at all, he can’t remember, but he ends up in the passenger seat of Jack’s car.

“So you saw this man in a grocery store last week,” Jack says cautiously, rehashing the information, trying to make sense of it. Will nods tiredly. “And you’d never seen him before? You didn’t see him after?”

“No,” says Will. “Just the once. We bumped into each other, literally, and then he left the store.” He can feel Jack buzzing with the follow-up questions, but he has enough manners to keep quiet until they reach Quantico, where Zeller and Price are standing over the body, just carted in.

“The flowers are white heather, symbolic of protection,” Zeller says, not bothering with introductions. “So whoever this guy is, Lecter perceived him as a threat. It is Lecter, right?”

“It is,” Will says wearily. He recognizes the work as though the good doctor had smeared his name in blood.

“Do we have an ID on the body?” Jack asks.

“Nope,” says Price. “All he had on him was a 9 millimeter handgun. Probably left his wallet in his car, but we haven’t gotten the warrant to start searching cars yet, so no way of knowing. We should have it in a couple hours.”

“So why is he trying to kill Will?” Jack mulls, posing it as though it will trigger some sort of empath epiphany. But Will is so tired. He’s so tired.

“I don’t know,” he says, rubbing his hands across his stubble. The sensory stimulation feels comforting, like a heavy blanket. “I saw him, he bolted. We didn’t even talk.”

“But what did you see when you looked at him?” Jack presses. 

“I don’t know,” Will says again. “He was scared. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a while, or showered in a while, or really done anything to take care of himself besides buy some food -- but he didn’t even get to do that, so I don’t know. He seemed paranoid.”

“Paranoid and violent,” Price adds.

“Let me think,” Will says. The room clears. Everything clears.

_ I’m scared. My hands are shaking when I load my gun. _

_ I’m scared. I don’t want to kill this man; there’s no cruelty behind this act. But he knows, he knows, he knows too much…. _

_ He has the look, the look they’ve all had, and I see him dead, and I see them all dead, dead and dying and bleeding out horribly, and I can’t let him know, I can’t let him tell anyone, or they’ll lock me up, they’ll hurt me. _

_ I will shoot him in his sleep. There’s no pain. He won’t be scared; he won’t even feel it.  _

_ This is my design. _

Will comes back to his body to find he’s cradling his head between his knees on the floor, rocking back and forth like an honest-to-god-lunatic, and inside that man’s mind he really does feel like one. He gulps for air and calls everyone back in.

“It’s him,” he says, staring at the body with a lump in his throat. “It’s the Sandman.”

“How do you know?” Jack asks quietly.

“He -- he is paranoid, he has intrusive thoughts, probably trauma-based, definitely untreated. They’ve been getting a lot worse, that’s why he keeps killing, but he’s also -- he’s smart, that’s how he picks them. He knows the way cops look.”

“The way cops look?” Price asks.

“Not, not look like clothes, but the way they see things -- everybody who’s ever been a cop has a suspicious kind of look for the rest of forever, we see the worst in everyone, and he sees that in us, he can tell -- except he thinks we’re seeing _ inside _ him, like we know exactly what he’s thinking, and it must be pretty bad if he has to kill us for it, he must be seeing us dead already.”

He pauses for air, keeps going. Doesn’t look at anyone in the room. “I’m guessing he saw someone die at a pretty young age, maybe his parents, or he might have seen someone die later and it just amplified the disorder he already had. It doesn’t really matter, it’s the same effect either way. He sees dead people, sees live people looking at him, makes them dead because he’s scared.”

The room is silent for a beat. Jack says, “Two of the victims were civilians.”

“You don’t have to be a cop to see the worst in people,” says Will, and when he looks Jack in the eyes, it’s Jack who looks away.

“We need that warrant,” Jack finally says. “Match this man to an ID, maybe match the other victims’ wounds to this gun.”

“They will,” says Will. “They will match.” Jack doesn’t respond, simply leaves the room with an angry furrow in his brow.

“So,” says Zeller, a bit too upbeat. “Looks like you got yourself a guardian angel.”

“Yeah,” Will says, feeling sick. “Guess I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> STAY TUNED NEXT CHAPTER FOR THIS EXCITING EXCHANGE
> 
> Will: i want to find him.  
> Jack: were you not already trying to find him  
> Will: what  
> Jack: what


	4. Chapter 4

Will is sitting across from Jack’s desk silently, watching Jack shuffle papers and wondering if he really wants to say what he wants to say. He showed up unannounced, but Jack hadn’t seemed to care, and now he seems perfectly content to wait for Will to unburden whatever revelation he’s had in the past six days since the body was found. It seems, at last, he understands how to treat Will like a person rather than his murder-tracking search engine.

Will isn’t bitter about this. Will isn’t bitter at all.

“I want to find him,” he says finally, and lets the words fall with a thud on Jack’s desk, heavy like stones. 

“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Jack says. He doesn’t bother attempting eye contact. At the very least, Will has the small mercies.

“I want to find him now,” Will says, a little too much emphasis, a little too much bite in his teeth. 

“Any reason for the sudden anger, Will?” Jack asks, at last looking up. “Do you want a security detail at your house?”

“No, I want to find him,” Will repeats, the blood in his mouth beating against itself relentlessly. He fixes his thoughts away from the thing currently resting on his kitchen table. It barely bears mentioning.

“Why?” Jack asks.

_ Because he’s a cannibal. Because he killed Abigail. Because he stabbed me. Because he tried to lobotomize me. Because he’s still out there whimsically murdering people. Because he brought me goddamn flowers. _

“It’s been long enough,” Will says, and drags his eyes up to meet Jack’s. “We thought he might go away, but clearly he didn’t.”

Jack leans forward, steeples his hands. “And what do you propose?”

Will swallows, but fights to maintain eye contact against all his instincts. “Call off the investigation,” he says. Jack sits back in his chair.

“Call it off,” Will continues, and lets himself look away at the floor. He made it through the important part. “Let me look for him.”

“And this would accomplish….”

“You know you can’t catch him. But he’ll come to me.”

“He might not,” Jack says.

“He will,” Will says. 

After that, of course, they fight. Jack says,  _ I don’t want to risk you going dark side on me, Will _ , and Will laughs in a way that isn’t a laugh at all and says  _ When have I ever _ , and Jack’s eyes turn black and angry and he doesn’t have to say anything at all for Will to add,  _ I won’t _ . And if Jack still harbors his deep and shadowy suspicions, well, that’s his own problem, because now the good doctor is Will’s and Will’s alone. If nothing else, the bouquet confirms it.

He had found it on his porch the morning before, spent a day carding his hands through his hair in frustration and, inexplicably, guilt, as though calling the FBI when there was a  _ corpse _ at his home were tantamount to returning a gift. Fortunately, he could use Google to figure out the meanings himself: bellflower for love. Red carnation for love. Gardenia for love. Honeysuckle for love. Mallow for love. A few flowers he’s still trying to identify but almost certainly represent love. And, in the center of the whole disgustingly artful arrangement, a single white tulip. Forgiveness.

He had left it on the kitchen table, wallowing in his uncertainty of whether to let the flowers die --  _ yes, you idiot, you goddamn idiot _ , the rational part of his brain had said -- or to place them in water. The arrangement had been bound with five pieces of long grass from his yard, elegantly braided together. Because of course that’s another skill the good doctor possesses.

Now Will is driving home, and he makes up his mind to put them in a vase, if he owns one. He should show that they’re appreciated, if he’s really trying to lure in the monster. Which, he reminds himself, is what that man is. Nothing but a monster.

…

That night Will is at the boundary of the forest, swaying heavily on his feet, and he’s had enough whiskey that he can’t reliably say if he’s dreaming or not. He runs his tongue around his teeth, tries to count them, gives up. Tries to figure out how the good doctor still manages to buy flowers when the whole country must have seen the face of the runaway cannibal by now, gives up. Tries, gives up.

Why did he get drunk? He remembers, foggily, deciding to have more whiskey than was good for him, sitting on the porch -- not in his chair, on the wooden slats of the porch,  _ oh _ , and he had been holding the flowers, that was it --

sitting outside his own home like a jilted lover in a romance movie, bouquet still in hand, bottle in the other, for all the world playing the part --

and the secret of the good acting, he had thought through the haze, was that he barely had to act  _ at all _ . Though who knew whether or not the cameras were bothering to roll. And besides, getting wasted felt nice. Warm.

And now he’s warm and nice and relishing in the pretend heartbreak, barefoot with dirty blue toes in -- god, what month is it? April? November? February? February, it’s February, it’s Valentine’s Day in two days, and Will thinks the words  _ Maybe you’ll leave me a real live heart _ out to the forest and giggles like a drunk.

“A real live heart,” he says, stomach sloshing, a grin on his face that reaches his eyes in the wrong way. “A whole one.” Then he knows he is dreaming, because he hears a bough break but no subsequent crash on the forest floor, and he almost thinks he sees someone.

_ Oh, _ thinks Will,  _ I know how this dream goes! _ The whiskey is inspiring an artificial giddiness. He doesn’t know the last time he felt  _ giddy _ . Alcohol works differently in dreams. Mid-thought, he realizes he’s already loping back to his beacon, his lighthouse, his home, that thing that he calls home. He thinks he hears Winston bark. Winston is home. He wants to be there because when he turns around he’ll see the figure for real, that beautiful blob of shadow that paces towards him endlessly, that lets him feel the comfort of inevitability. 

_ You’ll always come back for me, _ he thinks nonsensically, grass tickling his calves. He can barely feel it. It’s okay, it’s a dream. It’s okay, he’s dreaming. He doesn’t know if he’s ever had a dream this pleasant.

He stumbles stepping up onto the porch, clumsily assesses where he was sitting earlier based on the discarded bouquet and empty fifth, tries to slip back into the spot where his sleeping body should be. He bangs his elbow sitting down; oh well. The injury won’t be there by morning. Then he fixes his eyes on the treeline.

Will thinks he could sit forever like this, just seeing the figure come faithfully to him, pulled as steadily and ceaselessly as the tide. He almost senses that same hook running through his own chest, compelling him to move, but he stays, comfortably feeling as though his soul is wavering in and out of his body. The figure grows, and grows. Nothing crunches underfoot.

The figure has longer hair than he remembered. It looks beautiful. It catches the moonlight and spins it into gold. It is wrong and wonderful. He wants to weave it through his fingers until they are so inextricably intertwined that parting would surely mean blood.

“Hello, Will,” the figure whispers.

“Hannibal,” Will says, and he smiles up at him, his face as bright as the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know it's short and it's been three weeks but it's the end of the semester so be forgiving. does it help if i tell you i have great things planned?
> 
> i'm a sucker for one of the characters being drunk!! and drunk will is so cute and miserable and heartbroken and hopeful. and maybe asleep. maybe not :) :) (: (:


	5. Chapter 5

The first time Will wakes with numb toes and a sore neck and a sore back and sore all over, propped up on his porch against the side of his house at some time still in the middle of the night, and he drops the whiskey from one hand and the flowers from the other and stumbles into his bed, teeth chattering and fingers frozen.

The second time Will wakes in a sweat at daybreak and finds himself rutting against the mattress and panics because  _ nothing at all _ was hot about the dream he’d just had, nothing --

The second time, Will forces himself to calm down, and willingly succumbs to a half-doze that he can blame the dream on.

It’s not really his fault. When was the last time he’d kissed someone? When was the last time he’d fucked someone, or been fucked, or had done anything that felt good? Margot, over a year ago, and she’d just been using him, but there was something about that as well --

Eyes closed, mind sinking into a fog, he rationalizes. It’s normal for victims to need to feel some kind of power over their abuser. And the man tried to lobotomize him; no one would walk away unscarred. And among these disconnected thoughts are images of lips on his neck, of hands on his shoulders sliding down to grip his biceps, to hold his hips in place. Funny, then, that he isn’t imagining having any kind of power. He’d much rather be the one on his knees. He’d much rather be the one pushed into a wall and turned around and bitten and marked and fucked. He’d much rather be the one carried through the snow.  _ Take care of me. _

The third time Will wakes up, he washes his sheets, drinks a glass of water, and holds his head in his hands.

\--

Four weeks. The ground thaws, the stream gurgles like a newborn, and his dogs skip around the yard, tumbling through long grass and the first few clovers of the season. He stands barefoot as always, trying to feel some connection with the dirt, and throws the same stick over and over. The pack never gets bored. This could be their forever.

Four weeks since the bouquet. Four weeks since that dream. He’s had a hard time sleeping.

He can’t decide which hurts him more. The disgusting joy he had felt when the good doctor came to his home, or the embarrassing desperation he had felt the morning after. He can’t decide if it’s worse that they were dreams instead of reality. That subconsciously, some part of him imagines, longs for this.

In truth, what’s worst of all is the anger he felt at himself the morning after the morning after, when he realized he was expecting some sort of Valentine’s day offering. What’s worst of all is the shame he feels when Jack looks at him through dark eyes, silently asking if he’s made any headway. And what can Will say? _ No, he hasn’t left me any more presents in a month, and you called off an investigation to find a runaway cannibal so that I could get drunk and fantasize about him coming to see me and then have a sex dream, sorry, but I’m sure I’ll get him one of these days _ ? Fucking useless.

He’s had a hard time sleeping.

The mistake happens when he’s buying groceries, which for him is a bag of baby spinach, a bag of rice, four microwavable burritos, and dog food, which for anyone is pitiful. He internally justifies that it’s fine because the fish are swimming again and he’ll eat fish every night. 

Then there’s short black hair and hard-lined eyes with an innocent smile, tan skin and quick hands. “Will that be all for you, sir?” the checkout clerk asks, and Will makes eye contact and swallows and knows he looks vulnerable and disheveled and for some reason, to this man, inexplicably attractive. 

“Would you like to go on a date?” Will asks, throat dry. When was the last time he’d kissed someone?

The clerk smiles as though he thinks Will has said something incredibly funny. “My name is Felix,” he says.

“Will,” Will says.

“Sure, Will,” says Felix, putting his frozen food in a bag. “Here’s my number.” He writes it at the bottom of the receipt, then smiles again. “Call me soon.”

Will calls him that night. He’s probably supposed to play coy, or have a little more tact or something, but he wants to go out and get drunk and have someone fuck the loneliness or desperation or longing out of his system, and he’s sure Felix can here that in his voice when he says, “Want to go to a bar?”

“I have a feeling the bar is just a stepping stone,” Felix says through the phone, his voice crackling and staticky but still warm.

“I do own some whiskey here,” Will says, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he scratches Winston’s head. 

“And I’m guessing about twenty-five dogs, based on the amount of food you buy,” Felix says.

Will smiles despite himself. “Only seven. And they’re nice.”

“And I’m sure they love strange men.”

“Believe it or not, not a lot of strange men come to visit. I think I might be off-putting. Or maybe I just smell bad.”

Felix laughs into his ear, low and confident and genuine. “Well, as long as they don’t mind one strange man sleeping in bed with you.”

“Presumptuous, Felix,” Will says, and Winston woofs, as though he knows he was the momentary main topic of conversation and would like to return to being that. Will grins at him. He feels something like butterflies in his chest -- well, maybe just one butterfly, but that’s more than enough.

“Says the man who called to ask me to ‘go to a bar’ at 10 pm on a Wednesday. Want me to come over?”

“Yes,” Will says, and gives him the address.

\--

Felix, Will finds, moves fast. Drives over quickly, doesn’t pause at the way whiskey burns, smiles easily and without hesitation and makes no effort to conceal the way he rakes his gaze down Will’s body.

“Been a long time for you, huh?” he says when Will averts his eyes for what must be the hundredth time.

“I don’t excel socially,” Will says, sitting in the chair across from him and looking at the floor. “People find me hard to take.”

“And here I am, thinking I’d like to take all of you,” Felix says with a silly grin, tongue loosened by drinks -- or maybe that’s just how he is; Will realizes he doesn’t know. He doesn’t especially need to know.

Will brings his gaze up to about Felix’s knee and deliberately sets his glass down on the table so that his hands are empty. “You can,” he says.

Felix’s lips quirk and he stands, walking over to Will’s chair. He looks down at Will, then kneels on the ground and kisses him once, softly.

“Okay?” he says.

“Okay,” Will says, breathless. He wants. He  _ wants _ . “Come on,” he says, and he gets up and walks to his bed and waits for Felix to follow, and he does, unbuttoning his shirt as he goes.

“Kiss me again,” Will says, and he does, and starts working on Will’s shirt with deft fingers.

“Touch me,” Will says, and he does, and Will’s jeans are kicked off and their bodies are hot and sticky and rubbing against each other.

“Should we close the blinds?” Felix asks in between pants of breath.

“Who cares,” Will growls, “nobody’s out there,” and he pulls Felix’s briefs off and grabs him and holds him close, so close, so goddamn close.

“Fuck me,” Will says, and he does.

\--

They fall asleep with Will curled up against Felix’s side, cheek pressed to his chest, facing the window. Will dreams. He dreams he wakes and sees a dark figure outside, not walking towards him, just standing. He dreams he falls back asleep. In the morning, he makes Felix coffee, and they kiss before Felix drives away.

The dogs bound out of the house like they’ve never seen the sun before, and Will laughs out loud at nothing, thinking about how good it feels to kiss someone who isn’t a murderer, how good it feels to fall asleep with someone’s arms around him. He even allows himself the brief fantasy that perhaps, if the good doctor hasn’t contacted him in a month, perhaps he’s given up, or left the country, or tripped and fallen off of a mountain. The day feels so much warmer than mid-March ever is.

Later, he puts on his waders and goes out to the stream. He catches two brook trout and plans to cook them up, but when he makes it back to his home, a white tulip has been gently placed across his table, and he no longer feels as though he can eat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can hannibal maintain his non-murdering ways, even in the face of this betrayal?
> 
> will jack ever realize that will is, like, the worst possible person for catching hannibal?
> 
> will poor felix survive the next chapter?
> 
> find out next time on AS I TAKE YOU HOME, ao3's hit soap opera extravaganza!


	6. Chapter 6

He sits at the wooden chair for a long time, staring at the flower until his eyes blur and water and burn. It begins to look like nothing to him until he refocuses, and then he feels like smacking himself across the face.

He’s been trying to lure the monster in, of course, that’s how he can justify Felix -- what better creature than jealousy, what stronger captor -- he can justify the whims of his dick with the investigation if Jack ever asks, sure, of course he can, it’s all fine --

But now he’s probably put that beautiful man’s life in danger because he was desperate and horny and lonely and he wanted to be happy for once. The good doctor has already killed at least once since his disappearance; there’s no reason to suspect he wouldn’t do it again, especially with someone sullying his sweet, viperous mongoose. 

And how could he know? How could he possibly know?

Will drags his hands across his face, starts trying to compose a breakup text for a relationship that never really started, ends up sending nothing to that man whose chest he had slept on, curled and content, and had very nearly dreamt of nothing. 

How long is he willing to let this go on? 

It had always seemed absurd, the lengths to which the good doctor would go for a bit of well-done theatre. From nine-course meals to hyacinth-laden corpses, precisely sliced people to perfectly cut prosciutto. That had always seemed like it would be his undoing. His penchant for fine wines, for opera, for harpsichords. Too immaculate, too clean, not a single fingerprint on the china dishes, but still self-assured and arrogant enough to make sly little jabs at himself in the company of others, to assume no one would notice before he gave them notice.

Will reasons that he can’t be living his museum-curator, lecture-delivering Italian fantasies this close to home; the world knows his face, his name, his exquisite and refined taste, his lilting Lithuanian accent. Is he burrowed underground, surfacing not for sunlight but for glimpses of Will? Is he ordering roses and gardenias from some online florist, instructing the deliveries be left at the doorstep? That he has false identities and bank accounts is a given; that he has secluded himself to a life of hermitude is so sorrowful as to seem impossible. 

Grandiosity sustains him as much as the killing.

Though if he has given up one of them--

If he has already given up one.

When Will gradually rises from his haze, he finds the sun reluctantly falling asleep across the horizon, gold and amber spilling liquid across his lawn. The dogs seem to have been wandering in and out of the house; was he really so stupefied as to forget to close the door? 

He sets to shucking the scales off the fish over the sink so he can cook them in something simple like soy sauce. He knicks some skin from his thumb -- sloppy technique, distracted mind -- and stares at it without a sound as though paralyzed, or perhaps lost in thought.

Blood dribbles slowly from his finger and, as one of the dogs paws anxiously at the bag of food in the corner, it slides down across the almost-cleaned trout, coloring it crimson. Face preternaturally still, he turns on the faucet and rinses them both. 

After he eats and tastes absolutely nothing, he pours out more water and food for the dogs into ten separate bowls and watches over them to make sure nobody tries to lick up anyone else’s kibble. The sky is a rich, deep blue now, speckled with pale stars like a hen’s egg. Not a cloud in sight. 

The distant hum of a car approaches and comes to a stop in Will’s driveway, and soon a knock comes to the old wooden door. “Come in,” Will calls, knowing the guest already.

Felix stands in a grey henley and blue jeans in Will’s home and smiles at him natural, easy, and Will’s thoughts are flickering like a broken light between forcibly telling him to leave and pinning him to the doorframe or rather being pinned to pretty much anything --

God, why is he like this?

“I left my phone charger here this morning,” Felix says, a simple explanation, an offer if Will wants it.

He wants so much.

“You should, um--” Will braces himself against the kitchen sink, acutely aware of how stupidly ravishable he must look to this man who stupidly wants him. “You should grab it, then.”

Felix tilts his head, a silent query. “I guess I will,” he says.

“It’s, uh, it’s probably still over there. By the bed.”

“Thanks,” Felix says, and suddenly Winston is bounding up to him and trying to lick his face (a good three feet higher than he can reach) in an uncharacteristic burst of energy for this early evening. Felix laughs adorably and kneels down to ruffle his fur all over, and Will’s heart suddenly feels as though someone has nicked it with a fishhook and is trying to pull it out of his chest. He wants to see Felix as something other than bait. He wants to want this. He wants to want it so much.

He wonders if it’s okay to sleep with him one more time.

In the name of baiting the monster.

In the name of hurting the good doctor just a little more.

Then Felix is unfolding himself and standing up and unplugging his charger from the wall, and he turns and kind of smiles, kind of doesn’t. He takes a half-step towards Will, then pauses. 

“I guess I’ll be going home, then,” he says.

Will swallows down the rising bile in his throat. “No,” he says. “I want you to stay.”

Please don’t stay. Please don’t stay.

“Stay?” Felix murmurs, suddenly so close, so warm. He brings his hand up to Will’s shoulder. Will can only think of him inevitably bleeding out across the sheets when he says, “Two nights in your bed?”

Will’s breathing is ragged. He turns his head millimeter by millimeter, stilting, and brushes his lips across Felix’s cheek. The barest semblance of a kiss. He feel’s Felix’s lips turn up, slightly, and his body press forward, and his response is helpless and needy, and his mouth tastes like blood, blood, blood.

Will doesn’t sleep that night. He barely even blinks while Felix breathes steadily, calmly, likely dreaming of ordinary things. Eventually, Will slips out of bed, sits on the front porch barefoot with a finger of whiskey. Every once in a while, he checks to make sure Felix’s throat remains unslit, but for the most part, he stares at the treeline and thinks of the crush of teeth on a bared neck, or the good doctor’s fingers deftly holding a pair of pliers. He wonders how hard he can push the limits of a newly-born forgiveness.

When he hears footsteps softly approaching his front porch, he almost isn’t surprised.

He almost isn’t scared.

“Hello, Will,” the figure whispers.

“Hannibal,” he says, and he breaks into pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for being missing y'all. i've recently started working at a fine dining restaurant. that shit is crazy.


	7. Chapter 7

He looks at Will almost with kindness. His hair is too long now, still golden but falling inelegantly to his chin, and he’s wearing blue jeans, and that feels sinfully wrong. But he carries himself the same, still. He stands like a predator, still.

In silence, Will studies the lines of his body. Thinner, now, too lean. Sun-starved skin. And Will can feel, vibrating out of Hannibal’s body, the restraint he exhibits by not having touched him yet, the restraint in not having touched him in so, so long.

“You smell like him,” Hannibal says softly.

“Surprised you can tell under the whiskey and dog hair,” Will says.

“I have devoted a large portion of my memory to the intricacies of your scent,” Hannibal says. “He tangles it.”

“How did you stay hidden?”

In response, Hannibal turns away slightly, sits down on the front porch steps so that his back is to Will. He looks up at the moon and it catches his face, covers it in silver. “I bought a house in Wolf Trap the first week we met, Will.”

Will damn near swallows his tongue.

“Under one of my false identities, granted,” Hannibal says, turning slightly away from the stars so that his head leans against the railing as he looks at Will. “I am fortunate that the hunt never warranted a search of private residential properties, though I had planned for the eventuality. As it was, I had enough stored to stay for a while longer. I only left the safehouse a handful of times in the past few months.”

“The hair,” Will says. “The clothes.”

Hannibal accepts this statement with a slight nod. “An unpleasant precaution,” he says. “I was not willing to risk much.”

“The accent,” Will says.

At this, Hannibal offers the smallest smile. “Dearest Will,” he says, “Did you think me unable to procure a more convincing voice? I assure you that I am more than capable of sounding American.” On the last few words, his Lithuanian accent falters and falls and Will hears someone else speaking, a new person suit breaking through for a moment.

Then Hannibal slaughters the new person suit and says, “I have complete control of my tongue. I preferred to speak more naturally because I preferred to stand out, though I am not unable to change.”

“Old dog, new trick,” Will says, mind fighting hard against the drag of alcohol to try and run a thousand miles an hour. Feet stuck in cement, moving in slow motion. He wants to understand.

“You were right, Will,” Hannibal says, with tenderness so infinite it borders on cruel. “You have changed me, as I have changed you.”

“I don’t want the changed you,” Will says wretchedly. “I want to turn you in. I want you gone.”

“Yet you stay,” Hannibal says. There is no smugness, no gloating. Simply a contentedness with inevitability. His eyes are dark and sincere, and Will can’t stop looking.

Inside, Felix makes sleepy noises like a child might. They both hear him yawn, sit up. “Will?” he calls drowsily.

Hannibal makes no move to move. “It is your decision, my love,” he says. The words fit in his mouth like they were Will’s name all along.

“I don’t love you,” he says.

Hannibal continues to stare, soft and unfathomable. “Would you allow me?” he asks. “Would you kill with me?”

A thousand thoughts rise and struggle as they die in Will’s throat, trying to claw their way to freedom. “No,” he says, over the backdrop of Felix slipping out of bed, the crumpling of sheets. He rises unsteadily, crosses the threshold.

When he turns back, all that remains is a small figure walking towards the treeline, though maybe he only imagines he sees it.

Felix snuggles up to him in bed, and Will’s thoughts chase each other in circles, each more treacherous, enticing, beautiful than the last.

_ I bought a house in Wolf Trap the first week we met _ .

His fingers dance over Jack’s contact information, one arm curved around Felix’s shoulder blades.

_ My love _ .

He suddenly feels a wave of nausea lurch in his stomach, and scrambles out of bed to dry heave over the toilet, phone scrabbling across the floor, Felix’s sleep abruptly broken apart again. 

_ My love _ .

Felix finds him leaning against the wall, sweat across his forehead, shaking, as close to sobbing as a person who isn’t sobbing can be. Kneels next to him with concern and comes close but can’t, just can’t seem to make himself do it. Like his hands are too weak to touch. Like Will is too close to crumbling.

Eventually, he stands on his aching knees, uncomfortably backs away. Will doesn’t know if he goes back to bed, doesn’t care. Vomits nothing. Tongue made of sandpaper and teeth sharp stones refusing to be worn down. Teeth vying for their own agenda, wanting to bite, to break, to kill.

Then he does throw up. He flushes it down the toilet, runs a mildewy towel across his sweat-soaked face. It must be close to five in the morning. The sun must be stretching itself across the horizon soon, waking up with a small smile for the world.

_ The first week we met. _

“Who’s Jack?” Felix asks when Will enters the room. He’s lying on the bed with his hands folded across his stomach, staring at the ceiling. Will’s shitty little phone is on the pillow next to him.

“My boss,” he says.

“Who texts their boss at 4 am?” Felix says. Will can see the ordinary connections his mind is making, the basic assumptions, the rationale. The disappointment. Even a few months of a crush and two days’ worth of expectations hurt when they crash down on top of you.

“Someone who works for the FBI,” Will says wearily. Too tired to lie. Too tired to give a shit.

Felix pauses. “I didn’t go through your messages,” he says eventually. “Just saw the name. Thought he might be…”

“No,” Will finishes. “He’s the head of my department.”

Felix smiles a crooked little smile at the ceiling. “You an agent?” he asks.

Will comes to sit at the foot of the bed, not looking at him. “Something like that,” he says. “Not really. Not officially.”

“I’m guessing it’s too top-secret to say.”

“Good guesser.”

Felix chuckles a little bit. He sounds low-energy. “Just my fucking luck,” he says. “Hot guy, secret life.”

Will falls backwards on the bed, head level with where Felix’s hands lay on his belly. One hand comes to rest in the curls on his head, and he almost feels like a little kid again, crying in a trailer in New Orleans.

“Maybe this isn’t a great idea,” Will says, thinking of the psychopathic pet that leaves human teeth on the edge of his property as a gift.

“But you’re so pretty,” Felix says. Will can hear the smile in his voice, but he doesn’t want to look.

“I can try to be uglier for you,” he says. “I’ll only come in to buy groceries wearing burlap.”

“No good,” Felix says, still running his fingers through Will’s hair. “You’ll still have that tight little ass.”

Will laughs, then, really laughs, and it hurts like being gutted. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Felix’s hand slows to a stop. “Me too,” he says. He sits, then stands, then gathers his things, then they’re at the door and Will doesn’t want to say goodbye.

“Goodbye,” he says anyway.

Felix kisses him as the sun comes up, and Will imagines he’s touching someone else’s lips, that someone else is softly running their hands through his hair, that someone else is pulling him down further and further.

“You’ll call me if something changes,” Felix says, so quiet and small it’s almost a whisper. Then he leaves, and Will is left with nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> new! chapter! new! chapter!
> 
> anyway. who knows what'll happen next. not will :) but i'll give you a hint: it will be terrible for him


End file.
